The Bobby Bones Show - Episode 7: Comfort Food With Dignity

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Catering - and food service in general - is a challenging work in the best of times. And now, with public-facing events still mostly shut down, Heather Bublick and her business partner/chef/husband D'Andre Carter have found new ways to bring their gourmet comfort food to the masses via "Soul & Smoke." They're serving their delicious fare to school kids in need, unemployed hospital workers, nursing homes and "the populations that need us most" in their native Chicago. You can make donations to them directly through Venmo (@feastandimbibe) or Zelle ([e-mail]). Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS. Dot E-D-U-S-Military. This is on the job. This season, we're speaking with folks who are finding their professional stride in a tumultuous job market and learning how to double down on their skills and their experience to overcome challenges.

We'll bring you inspiring stories of people making themselves essential, an important skill set in any economy. The food industry is usually high-paced, arduous labor, especially catering, a line of work that demands a resilient, flexible spirit. When the wake of COVID-19, when millions of Americans are put at risk just by going to get their next meal, one woman is doing everything she can to make sure her catering business brings it to them. Hi. Hi. How's your day going so far?

Going well. Can't complain. This is Heather Bublich. She co-owned a catering company in Evanston, Illinois, about 12 miles north of downtown Chicago. The name of her company is Soul and Smoke. We do chef-driven, barbecue, and comfort food. Can you tell me what's on the menu? We do a lot of brisket, baby-back ribs, pulled pork. We have a signature mac and cheese with a top secret three cheese blend, lots of cornbread muffins. You can't tell me?

No, I can't. The chef behind their barbecue and secret cheese blend is D'Andre Carter. He's from the south side of Chicago. He's the other co-owner. Heather is more on the business end. So today, she's in the office doing payroll and scheduling. Well, Chef Carter is downstairs with their other employees prepping meals for delivery. So they're working on tomorrow's foods.

So they're making brisket chili right now. Chef is very particular on his brisket. You can get into a whole rabbit hole with him talking about how he smokes, how many hours, all of that. I don't do a very good job listening to it all sometimes. Probably important to note, Heather and Chef D'Andre are married. Oh, yeah, somewhere along the way that happened. They've also got a two-year-old daughter.

The two met when Heather started working at a restaurant D'Andre eventually became the executive sous chef for, the world-renowned Moto restaurant in Chicago. A Michelin-Star restaurant did 20, 25 course tasting menus, and then we switched the game and switched to catering. Having worked a lot in restaurants myself, I can attest that working at a place like Moto where people travel from around the world

for the best food and service money can buy, it's not worked for the faint of heart. And also, having worked in catering, that generally is even crazier. It is, at least at a restaurant. Like, you have your flow of service. You know what your steps and service are, what your sidework is.

Every day is the same. Even you know your menu. Everything is different in caterer. every day. So whether it's a 200-person plated wedding or a 100-person cocktail party that's an anniversary party. But do you like having a job where every day's different? It's better than every day being the same. Sol and Smoke has been well-received all around Evanston in Chicago. Right up until COVID-19 hit, they were catering big events like weddings and gala's office parties. It's a ton of work and being a relatively small business, Heather ends up wearing a lot of hats.

During our normal course of things, I am the one that will help coordinate the events and the ordering of the rentals and the linens and the execution and the timelines. She coordinates their marketing people with social media teams, taxes, payroll. I generally know everything that's going on in the building at any given moment. Meanwhile, D'Andre is busy cooking the menu for any given event in their commercial kitchen. Some of the meals have to be slow-cooked for days, so he'll routinely go to the kitchen in the middle of the night just to check on it.

I think that he just puts so much of his time and energy and making sure that it's perfect, that I think it's just so personal to him. On the other end of the business, Heather's restaurant training makes her equally invested in the experience. You know, I cannot walk into a dining room and not see a fork that's not out of place. I run the business side of things here,

but I also think that I'm also in charge of the whole front of the house operations for our full service events. She says she misses that part of restaurant work, being on the floor, serving people one-on-one. She doesn't work as many events as she'd like to. But I am still as obsessive about the linens and the napkins and how the silverware is done and the flow of service. And I get so obsessive where I can time everything out. And despite the madness of running a business like this with so many moving parts, their combined dedication has truly set them up. apart in a highly competitive industry.

It's crazy. It's like the thing I love to do. Heather grew up in Deerfield, a suburb in Chicago. And like many people who end up in this line of work, she sort of found it after straying from a clear-cut path. Would you say you were rebellious growing up? I mean, I ended up in the food service industry, so I was probably rebellious in some aspect for sure. Definitely grew up, like you're supposed to be a lawyer or a doctor.

She did not do that. She ended up getting her degree in writing from the University of Illinois, and then immediately went to culinary school, where she started out with a six-month internship in the kitchen at Motto. This is where she met chef D'Andre, who was also knee-deep in his own internship. It was rough work, and I remember very specifically washing these dishes with him and asking how he liked being there and him telling me, he's like, it's a lot of work. He's like, it's a lot of hours. But that did not scare her off. She cooked there for six months, and when she had to go back to school, the restaurant moved her to the front of the house. house as an employee. And on her first night, she got to serve a dish that she'd made in the

kitchen hundreds of times. And all of a sudden, I was able to talk to them about the food and talked to them about the dish. And I went to clear it and they told me how amazing it was. And I had never heard it before. It fascinated me. It was something that I didn't get in the kitchen. She fell in love with service and became one of their top servers. And after a few years at Motto, she went on to serve at other restaurants. And DeAndre was looking to branch off and do something different on the side. So in 2012, they decided to host a pop-up dinner together at a local venue. Turned out, sold out. We were in Eater. We had all this acclaim, like before I even knew what it was going to be. It was just all really popular, really fast. But then the venue got shut down. So they

started hosting dinners in their home at their dining room table. We were doing underground dinners for eight people, three nights a week. We started. Our first dinner was in January. By April, I had to quit my job because we were just too busy. People started asking them to come to their homes, to host 10-person dinners, 20-person dinners. People started asking them to cater their weddings. Yeah, it was crazy. And we were restaurant people, so we would just say yes, and we would just figure out how to do it. So, like, before you even actually knew it, you were a catering business.

Exactly. It's very much, like, our customers turned us into a catering business. We didn't know what we were going to be going into it, and then that's not what we are. They called their catering business Feast and Embive, which wasn't barbecue at the time. They started taking on more events, and DeAndre quit his restaurant job soon after Heather did to keep up with the demand. And I think it was even more so because he took that leap, that it was like we just had to figure it out. Feast and Embive was built for on-site catering events, but they were getting tons of requests for drop-off delivery-style catering. So they pivoted.

DeAndre has always... loved barbecue was the food that he grew up on. He grew up on comfort food. It reheats so well. It holds so well. It's brazed meats. It's smoked meats. It's almost better the next day. Exactly. So we created literally a menu that would work so well for this drop-off catering. Thus, Sol and Smoke was born.

It's only gotten crazier since they started, but today they are a very successful business. It's a lot. The rewarding part of it is worth it? Oh, for sure. You know, you're literally building a restaurant and creating an experience every day and being able to see people have that wow factor and nobody comes to us because it's Tuesday night and they just need to eat dinner. It is all people who are celebrating really special moments and we get to be a part of those moments and their lifetime memories which is

incredible. In 2020, after seven years in operation, Sol and Smoke was doing well enough to the point where this past February they stopped renting their kitchen space and bought the building that she's calling me from today. Immediately after they did, COVID-19 hit. The event industry was certainly decimated. It was very instant for us. We had lots of events, and then all of a sudden it was nothing. They had been prepping for St. Patty's Day, which is a massive holiday in Chicago. They had employees that were ready to work, they had menus ready to go, a big enough kitchen space to safely work in, and they were in a city that needed to eat.

So we had very early on started, like we had all this food, and we were just like, we're just going to feed people. How do we take care of the populations that need us most? Never did it even dawn on anybody that a month later, it would be this. More on Heather's story after the break. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done. Sweats over the details. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a response, you need a callback, you need a job.

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Find your location at Expresspros.com or on the Express Jobs app. Like most Americans, Heather and DeAndre did not have a playbook for something like COVID-19. Their business, like so many others, came to a screeching halt. So when Chicago, started shutting down, they figured they just keep doing what they do. You know, at the time, it was very much like we're just going to go down with the ship. We're just going to keep on cooking until there's nothing left to cook. They no longer had any clients at the time. But even before the pandemic, there were lots of people in the surrounding area who didn't know where their next meal was coming from.

A reality only made worse by unemployment and the closing of restaurants. How do we feed people? How do we make sure that people have what they need? We had this idea where we'll cook 10 meals and if people want to help and contribute to it, like, great. They called it community-sponsored meals for your neighbors in need. Basically, they were putting together meals that they were going to give out regardless. And they put a page on their website where people in Evanston could donate and sponsor a meal. By the time we just kind of put out the call of the community, the community just showed up.

The first day, they ended up delivering 30 meals. The next day, they did 100. And we were feeding, you know, two, three hundred people by the end of that first week. Like, it was just heartwarming and overwhelming, and we were just go, go, go. They quickly got funding from local organizations and started coordinating with schools to see which families in the area might be in need. They made a donate page where anyone can sponsor delivery to essential workers, too. Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and it's all their normal, incredible menu items, too. That brisket chili she mentioned at the top of the show.

is the meal that's going to be going out tomorrow, and every day is different. The next day is pulled pork with a roasted sweet potato and a cinnamon or butter. We really wanted to make sure that when we first started, that it was a meal that had a lot of dignity behind it. So we've always put just a lot behind it and making sure that everyone has a really comforting meal, especially during these times. There's so much uncertainty. It's kept our entire team employed, and they're all here, which has been incredible. Have you even had a moment to zoom out and reflect on how big this has been for your community? Yeah, I mean, certainly, especially in the beginning, it was mind-boggling that it was even, we knew that we wanted to feed people and it was like, well, this is now what we do.

It was mind-blowing. We had no idea that there were going to be so many people that wanted to support and wanted to be on the same side of this. And I'm still pretty blown away. I mean, we're currently doing, you know, somewhere between 700 to 1,100 meals a day, every day. This was never Heather's plan. Obviously not COVID, not these community meals, but even this business. It's not an easy life. And seven years ago, just before DeAndre and her started serving people in their kitchen for eight people,

Heather was going to stop working in the food industry altogether. And I was going to, like, get a desk job somewhere. I really thought I was done. I was like, I'm going to go to law school, I'm going to become a lawyer. I'm going to have a spot for like my shoes under my desk and it's going to be wonderful and that never happened. I worked in the restaurant industry for seven years in three cities. The hours can be absurd. The mental pressure of a busy service can be diabolical. And a lot of people you end up working with seem like genuine maniacs. There's moments where you think I am out of this madhouse. And still, I've left and come back three times now. What is it that brings you back? I don't know. It's probably just the feeling that you get feeding people.

You just nourish people and you've got to hear their stories and it's a part of life that you just get addicted to. With or without the pandemic, Heather and D'Andre are doing just that. They're continuing to serve flavorful food that has set them apart for seven years. food with intent and care in everybody. You know, with DeAndre being from the south side, he understands that, like, people have a sense where they feel forgotten about and left out of the conversation. We really wanted food that people felt like someone cared about them.

You know, we really wanted to stay away from anything that was cold. We wanted to be things that were warm and hearty, a meal that's already done and ready to go, and you don't have to worry about putting something together for your family and being able to give them a meal. true meal where it's like a gift, something that people could enjoy. Wow. It's really incredible what you've been able to do during the pandemic. How do you think this time is going to affect soul and smoke when and if things go back to normal?

We've been feeding so many people in the community for so long now. And we've talked a lot about it how to extend this beyond coronavirus and what that looks like. still trying to figure out how long through coronavirus we can even get through and what that all looks like, but I would certainly hope that we're able to continue at least some of this forever.

I feel like you've been constantly hitting the ground running and adapting so far. No problem? Yeah, you know, I think a good challenge. For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures.

The episodes were written and produced by me, Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. The show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at the loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring stories about making yourself essential. as you discover your life's work.

Audio. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill. Expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years, and waiting around for a technician to set everything up. It's a lot. Well, now they're Simply Safe. They have completely changed the game. Simply Safe has no long-term contracts, no hidden fees, no being trapped.

They earn your business by actually keeping you safe, not by locking you in. Setting up is so easy. You customize your system at SimplySafe.com. It ships to your door in a few days. And with the app guided setup, you can have everything installed and armed in under an hour. No technician needed. And it's not just a camera. It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and outside and 24-7 professional monitoring. If there's ever a break in, a fire, or a flood, SimplySafe's agents are on it immediately. They were also named America's best customer service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simplysafe.com slash bones. That's half off at simplysafe.com slash bones. There's no safe like SimplySafe. Service opens doors.

And at American Military University, it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule. so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at amu. datapus. Dot, E-D-U-S-Military. Open doors to the future for you and your family

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